KC DEBRIEF WEEK 15, FRIDAY 2024/04/12
DIGITAL TITANS
_ Apple is laying off more than 600 workers in California, marking the company’s first big wave of post-pandemic job cuts amid a broader wave of tech industry consolidation.
_Prime Video has a big audience, and now Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has put a new number on it: The premium video service has more than 200 million monthly viewers. Jassy revealed the number in Amazon’s annual letter to shareholders Thursday. “Recently, we’ve expanded our streaming TV advertising by introducing ads into Prime Video shows and movies, where brands can reach over 200 million monthly viewers in our most popular entertainment offerings,” the CEO wrote, spanning movies, TV shows and live sports like the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football.” “Streaming TV advertising is growing quickly and off to a strong start,” he added.
_TikTok is to take on social media rival, Instagram, by launching a photo-sharing app. The company said it was working on a "dedicated space" for images and text. Some users have received notifications saying their photo posts will be shared to a new "TikTok Notes" app unless they opt out. It is the latest example of social media firms imitating each others' products - including Instagram launching Reels, a TikTok-like video tool, in 2020.
ALSO
Taylor Swift's songs are back on TikTok following a dispute that led her label to stop licensing its content to the app. Her music's return on Thursday comes ahead of the release of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. Universal Music pulled songs by its artists in January, including Rihanna and Ariana Grande, citing a licensing dispute. Many artists have complained about inadequate royalties from TikTok.
_Spotify's new ChatGPT-like AI prompt makes it easy to create cool playlists – here's how to use it. Spotify brings chatbot playlist generation to its mobile app. Late last year, we reported on Spotify's plans to build AI into more of its feature – and in particular, what appeared to be an incoming update to create AI-generated playlists. Spotify confirmed at the time that AI playlists were indeed being tested, and now the feature has gone live to all Premium subscribers in the UK and Australia. The Spotify feature, which is still a beta so may be rough around the edges, enables you to create a playlist by typing in a simple prompt, much like you would on a large language model like ChatGPT. Spotify's example prompts include "an indie folk playlist to give my brain a big warm hug", "relaxing music to tide me over during allergy season" and "a playlist that makes me feel like the main character". You can create your playlist based on places, activities, animals, movie characters, colors and even emojis, but just don't choose one as Spotify recommends using prompts with multiple criteria – so for example a genre matched with a mood, an artist or an era. If you've used an AI-based image generator you'll feel right at home, although this feature from one of the best music streaming services is much less likely to give your favorite musicians any extra fingers.
_ OpenAI and Meta are on the brink of releasing new artificial intelligence models that they say will be capable of reasoning and planning, critical steps towards achieving superhuman cognition in machines. Executives at OpenAI and Meta both signalled this week that they were preparing to launch the next versions of their large language models, the systems that power generative AI applications such as ChatGPT. Meta said it would begin rolling out Llama 3 in the coming weeks, while Microsoft-backed OpenAI indicated that its next model, expected to be called GPT-5, was coming “soon”. “We are hard at work in figuring out how to get these models not just to talk, but actually to reason, to plan . . . to have memory,” said Joelle Pineau, vice-president of AI research at Meta. OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap told the Financial Times that the next generation of GPT would show progress on solving “hard problems” such as reasoning.
PEOPLE, MEDIA, CULTURE
_ IRVINE, California — Inside the Beall Center for Art + Technology, a trio of office chairs huddle together, as if holding a meeting. Their gathering is short; after a few seconds, the chairs break apart, roving past stacks of blank, white paper. Enchantingly, they move without any assistance from humans. Motors, motion detections, sensors, and sturdy, treaded wheels help them chug along a black vinyl mat. Katherine Behar’s solo exhibition, Ack! Knowledge! Work!, is a study of automation in the era of artificial intelligence. These ergonomic chairs — as well as a pair of Amazon Echo Dots and an automatic hand sanitizer dispenser — represent machines that threaten the job security of humans in white collar positions. At first, the devices appear to function flawlessly without any oversight, but upon further reflection, the artworks emphasize the necessity of human intelligence in the future of labor.
_AI LA LA LAND.
//Gaming, AI and other tech industries continue to be dominated by men — even though plenty of women are avid gamers, and women are more likely than men to be exposed to AI in their work. "When there's only one group of people deciding the rules and mechanics of a game, they impose their worldview on the rest of us. In that way, their games shape the communities in which we all live," writes Songyee Yoon in her new book, "Push Play: Gaming For a Better World." Yoon is president and chief strategy officer at NCSOFT, one of the world's largest online game developers, headquartered in South Korea. Yoon draws parallels between the biases perpetuated in games featuring male-only heroes and female characters sporting "impossible body shape[s] with no muscle and carrying big weapons," and the biases that get built into AI when it's trained on skewed data. Studies have found people absorb those biases from AI. Once biases and values are codified in a game or an AI model, "it becomes a part of our culture" and can become "the de facto view of our society," Yoon tells Axios. The big picture: The gaming industry has long faced controversies over gender, representation and bias — from Gamergate ten years ago to current attacks against supposedly "woke" developers. A report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released earlier this year found 76% of adult gamers in the U.S. in 2023 said they experienced harassment while playing online multiplayer games — the first decrease in five years. There were increases in harassment reported among women, Black and young gamers. Over the years, a vast majority of players said they also had some positive experiences while playing in the online world, the report says.
//AI hardware company from Jony Ive, Sam Altman seeks $1 billion in funding. A venture fund founded by Laurene Powell Jobs could finance the company. Former Apple design lead Jony Ive and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are seeking funding for a new company that will produce an "artificial intelligence-powered personal device," according to The Information's sources, who are said to be familiar with the plans.The exact nature of the device is unknown, but it will not look anything like a smartphone, according to the sources. We first heard tell of this venture in the fall of 2023, but The Information's story reveals that talks are moving forward to get the company off the ground.
//The idea behind the Humane AI Pin is a simple one: it’s a phone without a screen. Instead of asking you to open apps and tap on a keyboard, this little wearable abstracts everything away behind an AI assistant and an operating system Humane calls CosmOS. Want to make a phone call, send a text message, calculate the tip, write something down, or learn the population of Copenhagen? Just ask the AI Pin. It uses a cellular connection (only through T-Mobile and, annoyingly, not connected to your existing number) to be online all the time and a network of AI models to try to answer your questions and execute your commands. It’s not just an app; it’s all the apps.Humane has spent the last year making the case that the AI Pin is the beginning of a post-smartphone future in which we spend less time with our heads and minds buried in the screens of our phones and more time back in the real world. How that might work, whether that’s something we want, and whether it’s even possible feel like fundamental questions for the future of our relationship with technology.
//Europe’s A.I. ‘Champion’ Sets Sights on Tech Giants in U.S. Mistral, a French start-up considered a promising challenger to OpenAI and Google, is getting support from European leaders who want to protect the region’s culture and politics. Arthur Mensch, tall and lean with a flop of unkempt hair, arrived for a speech last month at a sprawling tech hub in Paris wearing jeans and carrying a bicycle helmet. He had an unassuming look for a person European officials are counting on to help propel the region into a high-stakes match with the United States and China over. Mr. Mensch, 31, is the chief executive and a founder of Mistral, considered by many to be one of the most promising challengers to OpenAI and Google. “You have become the poster child for A.I. in France,” Matt Clifford, a British investor, told him onstage. A lot is riding on Mr. Mensch, whose company has shot into the spotlight just a year after he founded it in Paris with two college friends. As Europe scrambles to get a foothold in the A.I. revolution, the French government has singled out Mistral as its best hope to create a standard-bearer, and has lobbied European Union policymakers to help ensure the firm’s success.Artificial intelligence will be built rapidly into the global economy in the coming decade, and policymakers and business leaders in Europe fear that growth and competitiveness will suffer if the region does not keep up. Behind their worries is a conviction that A.I. should not be dominated by tech giants, like Microsoft and Google, that might forge global standards at odds with the culture and politics of other countries. At stake is the bigger question of which artificial intelligence models will wind up influencing the world, and how they should be regulated.
//For the 50th anniversary of the iconic "Dark Side of the Moon" album, the band launched a contest inviting fans to submit animated music videos, offering a share of a £100,000 prize pool. However, controversy erupted when Damián Gaume, a 3D artist, won the grand prize with an AI-generated video, sparking a debate about machine-generated creativity. Gaume used the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model to create his animation, which led to widespread disappointment among fans. Critics argued that AI cannot replicate the artistic vision of human animators, describing the decision as a "slap in the face" to hardworking artists. Gaume defended his innovative approach on Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel, explaining he used locally installed software to train his own models, aiming to explore new artistic methods.
//NUCA, a camera that “aims to provoke and question the current trajectory of generative AI in reproducing body images,” uses AI to automatically undress any person it takes a picture of in 10 seconds. It’s billed as a “speculative design and art project” by creators Mathias Vef and Benedikt Groß, but it is a functional prototype that works as advertised, and only makes explicit what has been true since we first reported on AI-powered “undress” apps in 2019: it’s trivially easy to create nude image of anyone you have a photograph of. “This project prompts a crucial discussion on AI's potential, emphasizing consent, algorithmic fairness, and the societal impacts of AI-generated imagery,” NUCA’s website says.
_“As we navigate the opportunities and challenges that come with new and emerging technology, we remain committed to protect, celebrate and champion Real Beauty,” Alessandro Manfredi, chief marketing officer for Dove, said in the brand’s release on the announcement. “Pledging to never use AI in our communications is just one step. We will not stop until beauty is a source of happiness, not anxiety, for every woman and girl,” Manfredi added. Rosenblum continued: “The ethical challenge for most brands is not about whether or not to use AI, but rather how to use AI. It needs to be used in service of the audience, empowering people and creating value. It needs to be used transparently and authentically. Equally important — internal teams at brands and agencies need to be empowered to use AI to improve their jobs, not replace their jobs.”
_Ministers are considering banning the sale of smartphones to children under the age of 16 after a number of polls have shown significant public support for such a curb. The government issued guidance on the use of mobile phones in English schools two months ago, but other curbs are said to have been considered to better protect children after a number of campaigns. Esther Ghey, the mother of 16-year-old Brianna, who was murdered last year, has been campaigning for an age limit for smartphone usage and stricter controls on access to social media apps.
_ Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a programmable metafluid with tunable springiness, optical properties, viscosity and even the ability to transition between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid. The first-of-its-kind metafluid uses a suspension of small, elastomer spheres — between 50 to 500 microns — that buckle under pressure, radically changing the characteristics of the fluid. The metafluid could be used in everything from hydraulic actuators to program robots, to intelligent shock absorbers that can dissipate energy depending on the intensity of the impact, to optical devices that can transition from clear to opaque.The research is published in Nature. “We are just scratching the surface of what is possible with this new class of fluid,” said Adel Djellouli, a Research Associate in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at SEAS and first author of the paper. “With this one platform, you could do so many different things in so many different fields.”
_ The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island. By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation’s history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity. Aruba has long been a special place for Stacy Argondizzo. For years, her family has vacationed on the tiny Caribbean Island every July. More recently it’s been more than just a place to take a break from her work as a digital archivist—becoming wholly a part of that work. A project Argondizzo galvanized comes to full fruition this week. The Internet Archive is now home to the Aruba Collection, which hosts digitized versions of Aruba’s National Library, National Archives, and other institutions including an archaeology museum and the University of Aruba. The collection comprises 101,376 items so far—roughly one for each person who lives on the Island—including 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, and seven 3D objects.The Internet Archive is mostly known for trying to back up online resources like websites that don’t have a government body advocating for their posterity. Being tapped to back up an entire nation’s history takes the nonprofit into new territory, and it is a striking endorsement of its mission to bring as much information online as possible. “What makes Aruba unique is they have cooperation from all the leading cultural heritage players in the country,” says Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive’s director of library services. “It’s just an awesome statement.” The project is funded wholly by the Internet Archive, in line with its policy of generally letting anyone upload content.The Aruba project was set in motion in 2018, after Argondizzo, then working at the Internet Archive, began to wonder if she could help preserve Aruba’s history. The island has a turbulent past—its indigenous population was colonized by the Spanish and then the Dutch—and its archives contain artefacts ranging from sunny vintage postcards to books about the nation’s role in the slave trade and Venuzuela’s oil boom. Although Aruba is relatively safe from hurricanes, the threat of what a severe storm or other extreme weather could do to its physical archives made Argondizzo nervous. “They were one disaster away, basically, from losing everything,” she says.
BRANDS
_Dove, a beauty brand known for its 20-year marketing campaign around showcasing “real bodies,” has taken the initiative a step forward in the age of artificial intelligence. Dove announced Tuesday that it would never use AI-generated imagery to represent “real bodies” in its advertising. Rather, the company will continue to use real photos of women, while also promoting more diverse AI-generated images based on prompts about beautiful women. As most industries grapple with how to respond to advancements in generative AI technology, Dove’s approach is unusual. A slew of companies in tech, consumer products, entertainment, health care, leisure and more sectors have embraced AI as it currently performs and integrated tools like AI chatbots and AI-generated media. Dove, which carries products like soap, shampoo and deodorant, is one of the first major brands to suggest that AI-generated media can be harmful and should be improved.